Moms Who Flaunt Their Postpartum Bodies On Social Media Say They Are Targeted By Online Bullies

Babies change everything from
your priorities to your sleeping schedule. Most mothers will tell you that
there are both joy and struggles to pregnancy, and one of the biggest changes happens
to your body. But those body changes are beautiful and should be embraced
because hello – you just grew a whole human being! That’s something to
celebrate.

As we have seen, Meghan
Markle recently stepped out in front of the media wearing a dress that didn’t
hide her post-baby pump – reminding us that women’s bodies don’t magically snap
back to their pre-pregnancy bodies.

Like many mothers will tell
you, the post-baby body is full of stretch marks, loose skin and extra weight
that’s harder to lose than one would imagine despite what people say about
breastfeeding being a way to help shed the baby weight. There are all kinds of
postpartum bodies, and most of them a far cry from the size 0 celebrity postpartum
bodies.

A proud mom of four, Bethanie Garcia recently met up with some friends at a
blogging conference. Katie, Meg and Desiree are also mothers. Meg had started
the hashtag #this_is_postpartum to celebrate and showcase all different types
of women’s postpartum bodies.

This prompted the four friends to decide to do something many other mothers found to be brave and extremely helpful. All four moms took a picture, proudly showing off their postpartum bellies, and shared the picture to multiple accounts on Instagram.

A post shared by Bethanie Garcia (@thegarciadiaries) on May 4, 2019 at 1:07pm PDT

There were many hurtful people that took to shaming the four
friends by saying comments like, “How about dieting?” and “Posts like this
bother me. Not losing the weight is a choice.”

However, there were many other moms who had positive comments,
saying “this is beautiful and I’m glad to see women unapologetically loving themselves”
and “This brought tears to my eyes because I see parts on there women that look
familiar — but that I have never seen in media and that cause me shame. Thank
you thank you!”

Bethanie replied to the haters with, “The point being: the four of
us have been friends online for a long time and finally met IRL and took a last
minute photo together…of our different postpartum body types…to show that all
body types are beautiful.”

We’re proud these moms are choosing to ignoring the hateful
comments and are focusing instead on building up the self-confidence of other
mothers to embrace the beauty of their postpartum bodies, no matter what size
or shape.